Lucid Dreaming
Then said he unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? For they say, the Lord seeth us not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth.
Ezekial 8:12
A movie is a metaphysical object. There is the material part of the film, the actors, the set, and the physical medium, but a movie extends far beyond this. It is a coalescence of wills, of experiences, rooted in the past, now rising into the moment and branching into the future, in an unbreakable chain. At the moment it is viewed it becomes an indelible part of the media-sphere that overlays the psychecology, the collective sphere of awareness. It is a transcendental slice of the human spirit locked into intellectual property, illuminated, projected onto a screen, and reflected into the back of your mind.
The movie itself is only a tiny fraction of its overall existence, what is far more important and massive is the idea of the movie. This is demonstrated most clearly in “cult films” where the idea of a movie—its cultural cache, the coeval rituals & aesthetic values, etc.— takes on a life of its own, far outweighing the original impact of the film. Even the clumsiest dialogue in the most cringe-worthy amateur film is amplified by the coalescence of wills and the magnification of the medium.
Amplifying this even further, it has been observed that many major movies artfully bypass the conscious mind and communicate with your subconscious directly, infiltrating your inner being with sacred symbols and hieroglyphs that may only be decoded after several viewings. By then, of course, the damage is already done.
From there, it intertwines with your emotions, and your identity and embeds itself into the topography of the ever-present dreaming mind. We have been habituated to call this the “subconscious” and hold some idea that it is separate from the conscious mind, but it is more like a radio frequency, a reality channel, that we tune into and out of. What we call “waking up” is really nothing more than focusing our attention on, or having it arrested by the material plane. Depending on the path into waking, “which side of the bed you wake up on”, and countless other factors genetic and ethereal, the experience of materiality can be wildly diverse. The material plane can be envisioned as a flat 2D screen upon which countless ontologies are simultaneously projected. In the span of a single day, we may scale the “manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.” (Bergson)
What I am saying may sound mystical to some, but it really just comes from paying attention to dreams and the processes of waking and sleeping. These gradations of consciousness are usually ignored by most because we are told that dreams are “mental garbage” and that is true because most people are, in fact, mental garbage. In other words, their identity is the waste product of another man’s creative digestion.
But if your soul is intact, your dreaming mind is a holistic frame of reference and its dreams are a form of interaction in that dreamscape, archetypal encounters in those fields of play. But we have now come across another word that has been abused. ‘Play’ is perhaps the most important activity for the mind, play being a precursor to hunting, and large games a precursor to war. The hunt is for obtaining your wishes and desires— these are like skirmishes, tactical strikes against the fabric of reality, forcing it in one instance to conform to your will. The biggest dreams are a war with reality itself.
In dreams we simulate probabilities, we pursue our desire, we exercise our visionary musculature, we fine-tune the energetic system of our being in relation to our destiny.
This is where movies and other forms of art originate. Art is almost always a part of someone’s ongoing war with reality. Infiltrating the subconscious is the goal of any and every screenwriter with skill, and not by any means exclusive to some meme-cult. By watching a movie, or a TV series, you are signing up to be enlisted in the psycho-spiritual war of an unknown actor. In the brutal artillery barrage of images and emotions, they are re-sculpting the landscape of consensus reality to conform to the terrain of their own selfish dreams.
Of course, even a small film is the coalescence of dozens of wills, but when you are considering a big-budget film or “a cinematic universe”, you are dealing with the will of enormous egregores and principalities. People highly skilled in manipulations of all kinds, CGI companies affiliated with DARPA, directors, and writers that have immersed themselves in alchemy and theosophy, psychopathic actors that are hollow portals for non-physical entities, and producers that work directly for Mossad. In considering such enormous mental objects as films, solely by the way they impress themselves on the minds of the public, “we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.”(Bergson)
The parallels between the dream world and the virtual have already been drawn:
“The dream world is thus ‘virtual’ for precisely the same reason as a computer-generated synthetic environment is: in both cases, I feel physically present (i.e., I am phenomenologically present!) in an unreal place where my physical body is not really present at all.” (Revonsuo, 2006, p. 114)
”The mediating function provided by video games is much like the mediating function provided by dreams. Like the images in dreams, it is the images in games that provoke physical and psychological interactivity between dimensions of the personal conscious and the personal unconscious of the player. Like the brain itself (wetware), the computer is a medium that translates unconscious computational levels (software and hardware) into conscious levels of imagery and perceptual affordances. The interactive nature of games allows players to make choices that complete a feedback loop into the unconscious. We may think of this process metaphorically or literally as a synchronicity—a recursion of an isometric-holographic pattern.” Schafer, Stephen. (2016). The Media-Sphere as Dream: Researching the Contextual Unconscious of Collectives.
The overlap between the dreams and virtual world has been experimentally explored, using VR to create “bizarre breaks” in conscious individuals— violations of general world knowledge “occurring in dreams or hallucinations [that] are in general uncritically accepted and judged as real by the experiencing individual.” (Rosen, 2018, Scarone et al., 2008)
It seems that virtual environments can cause people to enter a dream state, and perhaps remain in such a state, even while offline. NPCs watch a Marvel movie and experience it as a high-quality product because the major part of their experience of that filmic object extends into the hyperreality, like the bottom of an iceberg. The “hype” and the consensus formation surrounding a movie have more psychic weight than the movie itself. This has been tested and demonstrated in video games as well, such as Cyberpunk 2077, where even though the state of the game on release constituted an act of fraud, the ratings on Steam remained relatively high.
Such examples illuminate the truth of the already cliche observation, “You are already living in the metaverse”. Of course, when human operators set up their first e-mail accounts, logged into America Online and bought their first cell phones, they were never warned that they were being exposed to a parallel reality. They were never cautioned of the far-reaching psychological and neurological effects of exploring cyberspace, of predators in the ether. Most Silicon Valley tech barons were keenly aware, which is why they sent their children to expensive Montessori schools that contained zero screen devices, forbid internet use at home and even refused to use their own predatory platforms.
The posthoc justification, “but you already have been doing X” has been used many times— “You already looked at porn on VHS, why not on the internet?” or “You already carry around a portable surveillance platform, why not let the NSA spy on you?” or “You already have been taking medication with mysterious ingredients, why not take an experimental vaccine?” and soon “You already smoked crack, why not inject meta-crack into your neo-cortex?”
Now recently, in regard to the publicly discussed “metaverse”, there is a pretty obvious choice of architecture being erected like pop-up Potemkin villages that I’ve tried to point out in the past and will briefly point out here once more. It is between “the nightmare dystopia” of Zuck’s Second Life clone, a fully immersive 3D “metaverse” and the various real-world actual metaverses that have existed for decades and are set to be upgraded with Augmented Reality (AR) devices. This reality augmentation, at least on a metaphorical level, is what we have been dealing with so far and it’s where all real trends are headed. We are provided a smooth path— as the AR metaverse slowly becomes as mandatory as cell phones, we can all chuckle at Zuck’s misadventures and the mid-tier corpos that will be forced to attend full VR Zoom meetings in The Sims ∞ : LinkedIn Limbo Zone.
The real goal is having you wear internet-enabled devices everywhere you go, full-VR will remain a niche experience most likely focused on gaming for many years. The internet of bodies is the dream-child that the post-human regime is desperate to birth. Per Niantic Labs CEO John Hanke, the former CEO of Keyhole with direct ties to DARPA and the CIA, and co-creator of Google Maps, in a recent interview (emphasis is mine):
Q: So you think the metaverse should head more in [the direction of AR]?
A: : When we think about the real world metaverse, we think about reality channels. The real world metaverse is rooted in what we do today, but it’s an evolutionary step toward some of the same ideas that some people talk about the metaverse. It's some of those same ideas taking place in the real world. Rather than staying at home and being jacked into your computer watching graphics, (it's) being out in the real world having a device bring these things to you, and make that experience richer and more fun, more efficient.
The following is a brief anecdote from Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), author of The Conscious Universe, and notably a Stanford Research Institute (SRI) alumni. Unfortunately, criticism of Radin’s work on paranormal effects seems to be composed solely of “professional skeptics”, a strange group of fanatical perverts that pretend to be scientists. It is a bizarre situation, so you just have to use your own judgment. Regardless, Radin’s pedigree is indisputable:
”Starting in 1998, I was in charge of a two-year research program at Interval Research Corporation, a private Silicon Valley think-tank funded by Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen. At the time, my project was one of a handful in the world engaged in the scientific investigation of psi (psychic) phenomena, with a healthy budget and a research team. We were mainly interested in the phenomenon of precognition, which we were studying in a variety of ways (Radin D.I., 2004; Radin D., 2006). My budget was sufficient to include computer scientists, psychologists, a mathematician, a statistician, a psychophysiologist, and a journalist. Three members of the project were especially notable: computer scientist Richard Shoup, creator of Interval’s psi program and winner of both an Emmy and an Academy Award for developing methods leading to the ubiquitous use of CGI (computer graphics effects) in television and movies; physicist Russell Targ, co-founder of the US government’s classified “StarGate” research program on psychic espionage; and physicist Edwin May, director of the StarGate program from 1985 to 1995 (May E.C., Marwaha S.B., 2014). Given Interval’s insistence on secrecy, few people outside of the company had any idea what we were up to.”
You have in Silicon Valley a Microsoft co-founder, the creator of CGI, former SRI wizards, and CIA’s STARGATE-accredited researchers all secretly studying psychic phenomena right up to the 2000s. The above excerpt is taken from the forward to Exploring the Collective Unconscious in the Age of Digital Media (Schaefer 2016), a book which among other exciting topics discusses the “electrophysiological basis for contemplating the Metaverse as dream analog”. Radin is also a member of the advisory board for the project. Here is an excerpt from the abstract of Chapter 1:
”The earth’s magnetic fields are carriers of biologically relevant information that connects all living systems. The electromagnetic coupling of the human brain, cardiovascular and nervous systems, and geomagnetic frequencies supports the hypothesis that the mediated reality of electromagnetic bandwidths can be correlated with bio-energetic and geomagnetic frequencies. Understood as bio-energetic functions, the media-sphere becomes measurable according to principles of coherency (measured as heart-rate variability, HRV) and principles of Jungian dream analysis (compensation and dramatic structure). It has been demonstrated that the rhythmic patterns in beat-to-beat heart rate variability reflect emotional functions, permeate every bodily cell, and play a central role in the generation and transmission of system-wide information via the electromagnetic field. So, the “media dream” becomes susceptible to psychological analysis leading to a better understanding of unconscious cognitive archetypal patterns of contextual collectives.”
Pretty mind-blowing stuff! Here again, is the CEO of Niantic, John Hanke, creator of Pokemon Go, former “foreign service officer” and an actual CIA agent, in a recent Verge interview:
”Your body senses the world and other people in a very broadband way: eyes and ears. When human beings are together over time, your heartbeats and the frequency of your brainwaves will actually synchronize. In terms of how we relate to other people, there’s a ton of stuff going on in the body that’s evolutionary in its origins, that allows us to learn how to trust people, to bond with people, to build relationships with people. Obviously, those adaptations were integral to our survival in the past. We are evolved and built for interacting with people in the real world. It is a deep, deep thing that is throughout our physiology and how our minds and bodies work.”
It sounds like Hanke is running a stepped-down voltage of the source material. Do you remember the mass hysteria of Pokemon Go in 2016 that suddenly came and went? I personally saw many people who had no business playing that game, and hadn’t done anything remotely similar in their lives, get swept up in the so-called “fad” that led to people running out onto the freeway or getting shot. In hindsight, it’s oddly reminiscent of the sudden transformations we saw with the Trump era and then, even more dramatically, with corona. Now in 2022, we are inured to sudden, out-of-character behavior erupting from our neighbors, in unity with the global population. In 1997 another case of Pokemon mass hysteria occurred in Japan involving an initial incident of a few hundred cases of photosensitive epilepsy that then spawned a psychogenic illness in a further 13,000.
Now Hanke and colleagues are investing in AR goggles that will beam photons into the retinas of millions, assisted by magneto-sensitive receptors, lenses, and other delicate sensors that could potentially collect electrophysiological data from our bodies. Bio-electric signatures, biorhythms, and information gathered in the infrared and ultraviolet electromagnetic spectrum have already been used for biometric ID, but I wonder what other utility is being wrested from the electric rainbow?
I am sure it’s nothing. Even though there are many patents and research projects focused on manipulating the brain and nervous system, I’m sure such advanced “noninvasive” methods aren’t being directly applied to AR devices right now. After all, wouldn’t the ethical implications of using bio-cybernetic feedback instruments to create altered states of consciousness have to first be widely discussed and—
”Figure 6 shows a collection of examples of the physiological signal interactive wearable device for VR/AR systems. Four different sensors, including EEG, ECG, breathing, and motion activity, can measure relaxation, focus, and meditation levels of the subject in conjunction with real-time VR/AR technologies (Figure 6A).[54] Noninvasive EEG activity indicates the change in the subject’s concentration level during relaxation and meditation. The electrical activity of the heart allows the monitoring of the heart rate and variability, leading the relaxation. The respiration rate measured by the piezo-resistive fabric sensors is one of the clear indications of relaxation, which is directly correlated with the meditation level. Activity monitoring based on the accelerometers provides useful information in focus level during the meditation. The measured physiological signals are wirelessly transmitted, extracted, and dynamically mapped to real-time meters that reveal concentration and relaxation levels. The estimated concentration and relaxation levels are then fed back into a central controller unit. Finally, the subject experiences the optimized scenic visual feedback for the meditation through a VR headset and the final score on the overall quality of the meditation.
—Recent Advances in Wearable Sensors and Integrated Functional Devices for Virtual and Augmented Reality Applications, Hojoong Kim et al
The global media sphere has become a chapel perilous where deep fakes and an endless series of psyops make it impossible to determine what is real. Cyberspace merely reveals and amplifies the asymmetrical geometry of power that has been there all along. The hall of mirrors created by age-old traditions of full-spectrum information warfare by elites throughout history and Machiavellian manipulations of the “reality-based community” has always been behind the facades of consensus reality.
The only difference is that now, through the political AR-MMORPG we know as “democracy” and its virtual wars that cascade into the physical, we have all become enlisted. Thus the metaverse becomes the time dividing and subdividing, bifurcating, and branching Geiger painting in which we live. It is the cybernetic theater in which we are all automatons. It is the bottomless book, ever unwritten, that we are writing into existence.
“Giving life” to an avatar means creating an extension to (rather than causing a fracture of) our body and our identity, and this kind of extended Self is the reflective consciousness of the recalling of the Self or the recognition of oneself as another oneself’” (D’Aloia, 2009, p. 51)
Real humans sacrifice their time, attention, and intention—the precious substance of their consciousness—bequeathing life to parasitic tulpas, profilic identities that, existing under second-order observation, develop into inorganic infestations of the psyche. Thus, powered by human wetware, these algorithmically deformed personae (NPCs) join a decentralized, distributed network of similar golems, spreading through the bright lattices of cyberspace like fruiting bodies of a fungal colony. This is the inversion of the great chain of being— the Word of God replaced by the script of algorithms and codes of protocological control. Here is a shadow realm ruled by Hermes: mediator, messenger, trickster god, patron of merchants. The transmitter of the spiritual to the material, the hermetic keeper of ciphers. Ultimately, the internet is ensouled by that other Hermes— psychopomp, Hermes pure Deliverer, escorting the dead into Hell with his “golden wand with which he charms the eyes of men or wakens whom he wills”.
Those who worship phantoms will become phantoms, but my devotees will come to me.
—Chapter 9, Verse 25 – Bhagavad Gita, The Song of God
The setting of boundaries in the terrestrial environment, of taboos and classifications, is the origin of culture (Schwab 2022). This boundary-setting process emerges from the dialectic of the organic group mind, the macropsyche, and the genius of the land. This is the first mythical war, the battle between the dreaming-forth of the group and the titans of materiality, which ultimately defines the tone, rhythm, and temperament of the group consciousness.
This mythical journey is meant to emanate from and to be guided by, Divinity, in accordance with the holy protocol, the Word of God spoken at the moment of Creation. The divine macro-organism, known as Spirit or as the body of Christ is supplanted in the cybernaut by the artificial life of mycelial networks that transgress all boundaries while simultaneously establishing a system of reductive, diaphonizing classifications, better suited to the purposes of intelligence agencies than any sacred order.
... what is the fundamental quality of the medium - or, as the Greeks might put it, what is the god in the medium? Perhaps ... it is the collective psyche or anima mundi - the "megasynthesis" of matter and thought into a self-reflective collective envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin (1959)
—Cliff Bostock, (1996) Cyberspace: Shadow of the Cultural Imagination?
If correlates can be established between the holographic-dramatic structure of dreams and the holographic-dramatic structure of mediated images, that structure provides a framework for research with which to analyze digital “dream” illusions as if they were “psychic” dream images. In the emergent reality of psychological electronic media, a Psychecology (an ecology of psyche) may be contemplated as a dreamscape. Ample research evidence exists (see below) in order to hypothesize that—like Jungian Psyche—the metaverse is holographic and that its computational patterns correspond to archetypal patterns of Psyche. The terms psychecology and metaverse are similar, but the metaverse is manmade and increasingly digital, while the psychecology is primordial. If this is so—and this is why we must refer to myth—archetypal images projected from the psychecology become archetypal representations in the metaverse. Because projections are essentially recursive, the patterns embedded in archetypal representations can be used like patterns embedded in dream images. So archetypal patterns can be employed to discover meaning, to diagnose collective mental disorder, and to apply therapy using media feedback targeted to fostering coherent states in contextual subject groups.
—Professor Stephen Schaefer, Principal Lecturer and former Department Chairman: Humanities & Social Sciences, Digipen Institute of Technology
The above quote is just a sample of what major game developers may have been learning at Digipen. Not just a school for game design, according to Boeing they are,
“merging the best of simulation technology from the software development, aerospace and defense industries”
In 2008 DigiPen's Research & Development arm created an Artificial Intelligence system regarding human behavioral modeling and simulation, titled B-HIVE, for The Boeing Company and their Phantom Works division.) The institute’s alumni go on to work for DARPA, Microsoft, and the top video game developers. It’s a more or less serious institution. Is Schafer simply an eccentric professor, inexplicably tolerated at a technology institute where it’s about $1000 per class, or is he “speaking out of school”?
Plainly, the metaverse is your mind. It is your mind—and neurophysiology—externalized. It has already been linked irreversibly to your nervous system, your psyche, and your dreams. In this sense, it is no different than a movie or a television show, which does the same thing. It is powered by your time, attention, and intention. It is a machine-augmented domain of speculative fiction, a transformation map steering the collective visionary experience of homo modulus, the new modular human. The cybernetic theater is filled with the blood of the audience, its automata are moved by the pressure of the flow, it requires your engagement to function, it requires your immersion in its system, in order to exert protocological control. Its only goal is to expand its own space of probabilities, approaching the absolute certainty of the eschaton.
This metaverse is a shared hallucination—a holographic illusion of the media sphere—and NPCs are material projections of the media-sphere into our everyday lives. If we can describe the NPC as a residue of the media dream, then we can simply say they are characters in a dream.
“Finally, I offer alchemy and Goethe's own image of what may be occurring in cyberspace: the emergence of the homunculus, a personified manifestation of the philosopher's stone, a union of the organic and the inorganic. Is this so different from the cyborg of contemporary imagining in virtual reality? Of that small creature, constellated in the moment of Faust's brief coniunctio, Edinger writes: ‘the homunculus signifies the birth of the conscious realization of the autonomous psyche. In dreams it may appear as a doll or statue which comes to life, representing the ego's dawning awareness of a second psychic center, the Self’” (Bostock, Cliff, (1999) Cyberwork, The archetypal imagination in new realms of ensoulment)
On the archetypal quality of cyberspace, it has been said that "the medium has enormous shadow." (Bostock 1996). The internet has always been fertile ground for strange dreams, embracing the long shadow of the human psyche. From a Jungian perspective, these homunculi are indeed projections of modern archetypes— decay, limbo, and the vegetative or mineral mind.
”If the Ahrimanic beings could realise their hopes, the whole of humanity would gradually be dissolved into the Earth: the Earth would absorb them. Finally there would arise out of the Earth — and that is Ahriman's intention — a single great entity into which all human beings would be merged: they would be united with it. But the transition to this union with the Earth would consist in this: man in his whole organism would become more and more like the living limestone[sillicon]. He would blend the living limestone with his organism and become more and more calcified. In this way he would transmute his bodily form into one that looked quite different — [a soyjack]. This form would then be able to merge gradually into the earthly element, so that the whole Earth, according to the Ahrimanic idea, would become a living Earth-being.”
Rudolf Steiner, The Four Seasons and The Archangels 2293. The Easter Imagination, 7 October 1923, Dornach
What I am saying goes beyond metaphor— these creatures are now only incidentally human and can not be expected to behave like rational entities, they are in fact Jungian projections for all practical purposes. Arguing with them will fail, and their beliefs will not be changed because they don’t possess beliefs, trying to “wake them up” is akin to killing them and they will only respond with hostility to the attempt, the only thing that you can do is confront them and process them in a lucid state. By being in a state of non-immersion in the shared dream, only then can it be remotely possible to communicate with the remnant fragments of a human soul.
Since we can know only fantasy-images directly and immediately, and from these images create our worlds and call them realities, we live in a world that is neither ‘inner’ nor ‘outer’. Rather the psychic world is an imaginal world, just as image is psyche. Paradoxically, at the same time these images are in us and we live in the midst of them. The psychic world is experienced empirically as inside us and yet it encompasses us with images.
—Hillman, J. Re-Visioning Psychology. (1977)
The same process of training the mind to dream lucidly is applicable to dealing with these media golem we are surrounded with. The same concentration of will and delicate attention to gradations of consciousness are essential in successful communication with these media-fantasy images. Before we call them projections we must be absolutely certain we ourselves aren’t falling into immersion.
In the movie Inception, projections of humans are compared to "white blood cells fighting an infection"; as the subject's subconscious becomes aware that the subject is being manipulated, they will attack to defend the subject's mind from invasion. I have heard this "white blood cell” metaphor, without reference to the movie, used several times to describe the function of leftists and NPCs in the post-Trump, post-Covid world. It is an entirely accurate metaphor, the only difference is they are defending the dream of collective personae, or egregores, rather than one dreamer. Cited is the NPC/projection’s complete lack of inner coherence, ideological consistency, and violation of general world-knowledge. Anyone who betrays that they are not under the spell of the current media dream is attacked, even reference to former media-dream content will also trigger an ”immunity response”. [It is interesting to note that the innate immune response of fungus is described in terms of “signal transmission, transcriptional reprogramming” and “nonself recognition mechanisms” and this would probably be a much more robust metaphor.]
Everyone will have different methods for increasing lucidity. There are benefits to be had from prayer, periods of isolation, and fasting. For lucid dreaming, I’ve had personal success using the Hemi-Sync system. The tradition of keeping a dream journal is perhaps the oldest and still a very effective method.
Psychotherapy being what it is, only a rare member of that guild will tell you the simple, straightforward methods for confronting archetypes that emerge in our waking life. The most effective methods for the confrontation of living contents of the unconscious were practiced long before Jung rediscovered them. They are found in the establishment and enforcement of taboos and the ritual sacrifice, excoriation, or banishment of the various materializations of the “shadow” that emerge from beyond or under the taboo boundaries.
It is a great mistake in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word, or concept. It is far more than that: it is a piece of life, an image connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion.
—Jung, CW 18, Para 96
Something as mundane as a taboo against the consumption of pork has within it all the elements. The pig is an obvious symbol of gluttony, refusal to consume its flesh is an immediate, personal abnegation of base appetites. Traditionally, the violator is shunned or isolated and made to contemplate his sin, and confront the “pig” within himself— his own gluttony and base desires. In Judaism and Islam, this is part of a complete immersion-breaking system that overlays food and consumption, something missing from Christianity.
In our modern world, all taboos have failed to be enforced, our sacrifices only propitiate the favor of Canaanite demons, and so we are dealing with the predictable zombie outbreak— a zerg rush of avatars of decay, apocalypse, and the vegetative and mineral mind. Searching for a remedy to this predicament we might find inspiration and some much-needed illumination in a tradition that comes to us from the Greeks—
During the Apolline festival of the Thargelia, Greeks performed the pharmakós, a purification rite that involved driving chosen pharmakoi outside their city's borders, whereupon, according to some sources, they were killed. It was said that criminals, slaves, or physically hideous or deformed men (bioleninist degenerates) were chosen as pharmakos, an outcast from society. “(T)he most unpleasant and mistreated by nature, maimed and lame man, such sort … they sacrificed.” Interpretations of these practices vary from those who believe they were performed for protection (to banish disease) to those who believe they started out as an expiation for death—either animal or human—in order to acquire new vitality. What is certain is that these rites also acted as a therapeutic means to process unconscious images as they appeared.
By whipping the pharmakoi with magical plants, the community was freed from harmful influences and invested with procreative powers for the year to come. The pharmakos rite involved the summoning of a "god of vegetation" (the vegetable mind), who was personified in the pharmakoi, adorned with sprigs, fed, then “slain”, symbolically in most cases, so the plant-god could be reborn renewed in strength, and famine or pestilence averted. However the pharmakos is believed to be more than a rustic custom, Helladius writes that the ritual was a means of averting pestilential diseases:
”Because it was the custom at Athens to lead two pharmakoi … This cleansing served to ward off plagues of disease, and it took its beginning from Androgeus the Cretan [son of King Minos] because the Athenians were afflicted with a plague of disease when he died unjustly in Athens, and this custom began to be in force, to always cleanse the city with pharmakoi.”
—Helladius, in Photius Bibliotheca 279
Many etymologies of ‘pharmakos’ have been proposed, but the most likely explanation is that the word is the masculine form of pharmakon, ‘drug, medicine’(Hughes, 1994). A pharmakon is a “magical dose” which brings on destruction or restoration. So then pharmakos would be ‘wizard’, ‘magic man’ or ‘sacred-man’. Therefore, the association between this ritual sacrifice and Apollo probably stems from his connections to purification and disease prevention/cure. The phrase ‘to cleanse the city’, arises in the oldest source, Hipponax, and often thereafter.
The pharmakoi were dressed and decorated in “holy garments,” vestibus sacris, paraded through the city, whipped on the genitals with fig branches and squills, cursed at, and pelted with stones. The phamakoi were also known as summbakkhoi, or ‘fellow-possessed’.(Helladius ad Photius Bibliotheca). The pharmakos is a form of therapeia—‘service, tending, medical treatment’—for the prevailing disaster. This whole process was called katharsis.
The psychodrama of the rite is self-evident and indeed the pharmakoi were often the subject of Greek tragedies. The body politic purifies itself, not just by expelling unwanted people, but first transforming them into sacred vessels, recoding them so that they may be transferred through transmundane protocols. However, it is in the synthesis of both associations, the vegetative and cathartic, in context with the murder of the man-as-plant, that we find one of many possible roots of human sacrifice in the West. The key we find is at Chaeronea, where the expelled pharmakoi were called boulimos, “ravenous hunger”. This could suggest that the genesis of ritualized human sacrifice developed from the sublimation of suppressed blood lust, the “ravenous hunger” and madness brought on by the grain diet.
It is through ritual performance that social reality is created. The philologist Walter Burkert has shown (1972), how Greek tragedy grew out of ritual sacrifice or rather, the performances of human sacrifice co-evolved with the theater. Nearly all theories about the mind are variations or extensions of the classic idea that consciousness is like “a ‘bright spot’ cast by a spotlight on the stage of a dark theater that represents the integration of multiple sensory inputs into a single conscious experience, followed by its dissemination to a vast unconscious audience.” (Baars, 1998)
An ordinary Greek sacrifice to the Olympian gods began with aggressively hurling unground barley grains (plant as weapon, missile), the most ancient agricultural product, onto the sacrificial animal, the altar, and the earth. This incorporation of grains or other cultivated plants is everywhere in the symbols and practices of ritual sacrifice. After the blood has been received by the stone, the organs are examined by seers, divided, and consumed by an inner circle of participants. It has been shown that the cultic sacrifice evolved out of the hunt and the ritual distribution of its spoils (Meuli 1946; Baudy 1983). "The ideal hunt becomes the sacrifice," Burkert reminds us, "The ideal sacrifice becomes the hunt" (1983:31). It is highly probable that the division of meat is the origin of the cultic and social establishment of order. By following the etymology of the name “Moirai”, the goddesses of fate, we find it was originally "flesh distributors," and of course, those “demons” that tempt us away from our greater destinies have always existed in the context of animal or human sacrifice.
There has been speculation that certain instances of human sacrifice in agricultural society spontaneously erupted under the influence of ergot poisoning or other mycotoxins. The mycelial macrobe and its faerie rings have always been shrouded and encircled in taboo. Invasions from the fungal kingdom, whether accidental or intentional, may have been a perennial element in various modes of human sacrifice, such as the burning of witches:
”One could reasonably ask whether, if ergot was implicated in Salem, it could
have been implicated in other witchcraft incidents. The most cursory examination of Old World witchcraft suggests an affirmative answer. The district of Lorraine suffered outbreaks of both ergotism and witchcraft persecutions periodically throughout the Middle Ages until the 17th century. As late as the 1700s, the clergy of Saxony debated whether convulsive ergotism was symptomatic of disease or demonic possession. Kittredge, an authority on English witchcraft, reports what he calls "a typical case" of the early 1600s. The malicious magic of Alice Trevisard, an accused witch, backfired and the witness reported that Alice's hands, fingers, and toes "rotted and consumed away." The sickness sounds suspiciously like gangrenous ergotism. Years later, in 1762, one family in a small English village was stricken with gangrenous ergotism. The Royal Society determined the diagnosis. The head of the family, however, attributed the condition to witchcraft because of the suddenness of the calamity.”
—Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem? Convulsive ergotism may have been a physiological basis for the Salem witchcraft crisis in 1692. Linnda R. Caporael
But I will not engage in the cultural chauvinism and bigotry of white-supremacist “anthropologists” and discard the ethnographies and oral traditions of countless indigenous cultures, the enlightened cosmographies of brown bodies, and the ontologies of all pre-Colombian civilizations. It is apparent that ergot poisoning and other mycelial intoxicants cause the victims to become vulnerable to the voices and visions projected by less-than-physical entities. Fray Diego Durán recounts the coronation of the Aztec King Montezuma:
"The sacrifice finished and the steps of the temple and patio bathed in human blood, they all went to eat raw mushrooms; on which food they went out of their minds, worse than if they had drunk much wine; so drunk and senseless were they that many killed themselves by their own hand, and, with the force of those mushrooms, they would see visions and have revelations of the future, the Devil speaking to them in that drunken state."
Once again the fungal bloom of mass hysteria interrupts our lives and bedevils our minds. However, today we are infected with an electrical, cyber-mycelial network that has cordycepted many of our neighbors and co-workers. I am not suggesting that you whip them with magical plants, strike their genitals, and drive them from the city to achieve katharsis. Unfortunately, it is far too late for such measures.
What you can do is organize your own catharsis following the outlines set up by the Greeks. It is definitely within your right to banish vegetable-men from your property, to exorcise the mineral spirit from your mind by banning its low-frequency waveforms from your sphere of awareness. Symbolic wicker-men can be constructed and immolated, followed by feasts of succulent meats. Various social dramas may be directed to “purify” your surroundings. The hideous ‘homo soypiens’ can be expelled in countless ways, but the taboo boundary space must be established and respected. No matter where you are in life, you are in control of what you watch and what you eat.
Dreams give information about the secrets of the inner life and reveal to the dreamer hidden factors of his personality. As long as these are undiscovered, they disturb his waking life and betray themselves only in the form of symptoms. This means that we cannot effectively treat the patient from the side of consciousness alone, but must bring about a change in and through the unconscious. (Jung, 1933, p. 16)
Due to correlations between dream architecture and media architecture, Jungian principles can be applied to virtual realities, movies, and RPGs, and this works both ways. We already have an understanding of humans possessed by the media dream as “non-player characters” (NPCs) but once again, we should not abandon this to the realm of convenient metaphor. There are many properties of NPC life that suggest RPG rules apply. One could say that an NPC is born out of man-machine miscegenation, but the precise race of machine that fathers this golem is called “gamification”.
The golem of the media-sphere are rules-based creations—and they bear the imprint of their manufacture—there is almost always an item or a quest or a document that will allow you to bypass them. There are many people that managed to navigate the last two years without succumbing to a single “mandate”. Something as simple as having a beverage or a cigarette on hand allowed many to skirt mask decrees. Blessed scrolls with carefully worded incantations and specific references to Holy Scripture were able to nullify the necromancy of HR departments. These are not things that should be possible in a serious “totalitarian state”, but they are common to RPGs.
When we are lucid, in a state of flow, it becomes easy to see these exploits. Once understood and elaborated, they can exert an extraordinary effect on your life in the media-sphere. Never forget—underlying the mass hallucination and the endless series of psyops—this is your world, your dream, and there is always a way to win.
“The hero’s main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: it is the long-hoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious…The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before. ‘And God said, “Let there be light!”’ is the projection of the immemorial experience of the separation of consciousness from the unconscious.”
—Jung, C. G. (1963/70) Collected Works vol.14. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), para. 753
Absolutely brilliant.
Fascinating read, and very well constructed. I'm curious, you mentioned Christianity lacking the dietary taboos of Islam and Judaism, are you familiar with the Orthodox Christian fasting rules? If not, I think you'll find Orthodoxy a very interesting subject to research wrt this topic of the purpose of food and sacrifice and katharsis, and also just in general.
Looking forward to the next piece